Improving Customer Experience and Profitability By Digitizing a Custom Building Manufacturer

Many manufacturers that have existed for some time have realized the need to digitize customer and employee workflows is key to growing revenues and profits

A custom building manufacturer, founded in 1997, was built with a focus on getting the manufacturing process right, not implementing software. But eventually the manual nature of the business was limiting growth and profitability. They needed to modernize their workflows. Given that they had minimal in-house technical expertise, they turned to a 3rd-party software development firm. Hackheads was hired to manage that development process.

Turning Paper and Spreadsheets Into Software Is Not Easy

When you are building a business, generating sales and delivering for customers is paramount. The best approach is get that part right then try to streamline. That means a business creates extremely flexible processes in the beginning. That usually means paper and spreadsheets since they are easy to implement and very flexible. You can adjust quickly to clients’ varying needs and create new products quickly. You can be nimble.

But when it comes time to digitize, that nimbleness and flexibility can be difficult to turn into a system. You need systematize your workflows into repeatable, standardized ones. Paper and spreadsheets can support an infinite number of workflow permutations and exceptions to the rule. But that won’t work for digitized workflows. Are your products, prices, customer facing experiences, and internal workflows standardized? For this custom building manufacturer, the answer was no. A heavy lift for this project happened before any code or software was implemented. Hackheads helped the client systematize their products, pricing, and workflows.

Another hurdle in a project like this is employee friction. One of the goals of enterprise digitization is to scale. If you have very manual, hands-on processes that means people are heavily involved throughout every step of the process. That’s not a great way to scale profitability if revenue growth means a linear growth in team size. So in addition to getting the workflows process streamlined, your new system needs to be adopted by your team. People hate change. Just like any product growth project, we needed to get the input of key stakeholders, incorporate their feedback, and get them behind the idea of change. The buy-in in part comes from the fact that much of the new processes came from their ideas.

Improving Customer Experience AND Scaling Profits

Digitizing your internal operations makes it a lot easier to improve customer experience AND improve the efficiency of delivering products and supporting customers. One fun aspect of this project was that since we digitized their products and pricing, we could build a 3D modeling interface for customers. Instead of the manual process of a salesperson taking customers through a bunch of paper-based brochures, now customers can work independently, or with a dealer, to create real-time models with real-time pricing. The modeling software has detailed understanding of the client’s manufacturing and installation processes, regional regulations, and permit requirements so it can simulate a very realistic model the desired building.

Along with the 3D modeling software, we built a customer portal that turns a very person-intensive support process into a self-serve model that allows the client to service more clients with fewer support staff and provides a better experience for customers.